


Cursed

by RandomCat23



Category: Gangsta. (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Family, Gen, Happy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26597554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RandomCat23/pseuds/RandomCat23
Summary: They say my father is cursed and then thrice cursed for passing that burden onto me and my sister. I'm not so sure I believe them though.Post Series, OC (Nic's son) POV
Relationships: Alex Benedetto/Nicolas Brown
Comments: 15
Kudos: 43





	Cursed

**Part I: Cursed**

They say my father is cursed.

Born a legacy of war, he is then thrice cursed for passing that burden on to me and my sister.

People still say that even now, 15 years after the last Twilight Hunts. When new drugs have all but eliminated the worst aspects of the burden and Ergastulum has achieved the closest thing to peace it's ever seen.

We're still cursed.

That's what people say.

* * *

We don't live with my father.

It's some old agreement they made when I was very young. I'm told I took my first steps in the Handymen headquarters, but my mother and I moved out soon after that. The arrangement held even after my sister was born. When I ask why we don't live together, my mother goes quiet and touches a scar on her arm.

Father and Uncle Worick still live there.

We aren't far away though. Our apartment is small, but homey in a way the Handymen Headquarters isn't. There are concert posters and cheap art hung nicely on the walls. The overworked record player in the corner of the living room is flanked by bookshelves. On most nights our homework is spread out over the crooked kitchen table while my mother hums at the sink or stove. It's cozy, I guess, but sometimes too cozy.

So, I visit my father and Uncle Worick often.

It's a ten minute walk if you're not in a hurry and you stick to the main streets. I've found a faster way, one I've hidden from my mother, but she knows my trick. The tone in her voice gives it away when I call her from my father and Uncle Worick's a little too soon; stern, exasperated, but there's a thin vein of amusement too.

_"Did you sprint the whole way there?"_

I've learned to wait to call to keep up the illusion. Uncle Worick and my father exchange amused looks while I count down the seconds and then pick up the phone to let her know I've arrived.

Most of the time, we go over together. My father always meets us at the bottom of the steps, silent and smirking.

We play cards, go for walks. Because we live in Ergastulum and my sister and I have tags around our necks, we train with weapons and in martial arts. My sister has the attention span of a fly, so while I swing a sword around, Uncle Worick takes her shooting. Mother cooks and cleans with the expectation that no one else will. Father likes to prove her wrong, pushing me to vacuum, thrusting a dusting rag into my sister's unwilling hands.

When he thinks no one is looking, Father embraces Mother from behind and lets her lead him in a swaying dance to whatever song she's singing.

Two homes without a divorce isn't typical, but it works for us.

* * *

_"Your father is an idiot," Dr. Theo once said to me while stitching up my forehead after I fell hopping a roof. "Do not follow in his footsteps."_

_Dr. Nina protested from the next room over, "Stop picking on Nico! You feed his bad habits to some degree, Theo!"_

* * *

I think we live a good life.

My mother is the city's most-sought after singer. She has a standing contact with Bastard but takes other gigs when she can. All the clubs boast when they book her with posters and radio ads. Sometimes they'll pay a kid to stand on the street corner twirling a sign with her name and date. She's a guaranteed sold out crowd.

Father is what he has been for his entire life. From what I've put together, the job's a little bit different now, but not _that_ different because the city will and always will be rough and dirty.

When I ask Uncle Worick what it is that they do, he describes it as "Anything" before giving me a cheeky grin and a hand sign for money.

When I ask my mother, she pauses, picking her words carefully. "Whatever needs done," is what she says.

When I ask my father, he shrugs. Eventually signing: _Whatever Worick gets us into_.

I'm perceptive. I eye the bandages, the boxes of bullets, the stashes of cash. I read the calendar when no one is looking. My imagination pieces together the rest. There's the deliveries, the weapons, and threats. The displays of power, the reminders to those toeing the line that the line exists for a reason and there are consequences for crossing it.

They do a mixed bag of dirty work.

I think _Handymen_ fits just fine.

* * *

I'm fifteen. My sister is ten.

One time around the Sunday dinner table she talks too fast, excited to tell Uncle Worick about whatever pops into her head. School. Something she found on the road. Her new toy. Mom pushes my sister's long hair back from her forehead when she bothers to take a breath. They laugh.

My father gives up trying to read my sister's lips and sits back to simply watch. I swallow, annoyed. She's not even trying to sign. I open my mouth to scold her.

My father stops me with a hand around my wrist and a swift shake of his head.

_"Let her be."_

He cracks open an extra Perrier and offers it to me.

We clink our glass bottles together as the rest of the table roars with laughter.

* * *

_"Your father is dangerous," Uncle Emilio said to me under his breath._

_Uncle Emilio wore his opinions about Twilights on his sleeve. Untrustworthy, wild like animals, no morals._

_I almost scoffed at him over the cards in my hand. I am a Twilight, even if Uncle Emilio doesn't want to acknowledge that._

_He cast a hard glance at my father who was busy playing Go Fish with my sister. He frowned, tsked, and then waved it away as if he hadn't said anything at all._

* * *

I'm told the city is better than it used to be, but still not safe. I'm old enough now to know it is an anomaly in the world; I've never left Ergastulum, but have heard of places like Paris, New York, and Kyoto. Cities without boundaries, guards, or gates. Cities that don't cage half of their population with the access to medicine.

Must be paradise.

Sometimes I imagine myself walking those foreign streets. I try to envision what it's like to not worry about crossing a boundary I shouldn't, or venture into a store without looking for the _Twilights Allowed_ sign. Streets never washed with blood, where carrying a weapon is an oddity and not necessary.

Paradise, but it also sounds boring.

* * *

_I woke up on my back. I shot upward and registered three things at once: I'm on a couch, I'm at the Handymen Headquarters, and my father was angry._

_Furious._

_It's hidden in the glint of his eyes and his clenched jaw. I rubbed my eyes and then tried to find the source of his fury ._

_"_ What happened?" _I signed. The last thing I remembered was taking my shortcut on my way to visit._

 _"You fell asleep,"_ _Father growled._

_It took me a second for my brain to catch up._

_It's my burden: narcolepsy._

_Before I can answer, Uncle Worick appeared in the doorway and, seeing me, let out a sigh of relief. "Hey, you found him. I'll call Ally."_

_While the phone rang, I rubbed my cheek, displacing the grit from the backstreet. There weren't any bandages that I could see or feel; I was not bleeding. My head did not hurt. Nothing happened. I was fine. As I went to stand, my father jabbed me roughly in the shoulder._

_"_ Stick to the main roads from now on. Or I'll follow you home. _" His hands jerked through the movements. He glared at me over his shoulder and then disappeared into the basement._

_It stung._

_But, I was fifteen, so I refused to cry._

_"Lucky break there, kid." Uncle Worick plopped down next to me on the couch. "Your Dad got you before the mob did."_

_"Nothing happened," I huffed, because a scratched cheek wasn't anything to write home about. I fell asleep all the time. In school. At home. I stared at the ceiling at night and wondered when sleep will strike me like lightning. I've learned to deal with it. Like every other Twilight, I had to._

_Uncle Worick took out a cigarette, thought better of it and walked to an opened window. "I think the mob would disagree."_

_I gaped at him, then at the basement door and back again. Uncle Worick took a drag and carefully suggested, "You should call your Mum."_

* * *

I think my father is dying.

I'm well aware of Twilights' short life spans. That's part of the burden, written down in textbooks as if talking about eye color, height, or weight. Classmates will give me the side eye every time it's mentioned, as if they're trying figure out if it's true, and then to calculate how long _I_ have left. It never really bothered me.

It's one thing to read it, another to see it firsthand.

I was practicing my swordsmanship when it happened.

My father used to demonstrate, make me stand and watch his efficient, brutal movements. Now, he insists I know enough for him to just correct my stance and technique. One day, he gestures for me to attack him. I've never been able to strike him before. He's too fast.

Maybe that's why I ignored the textbooks.

My father is invincible.

Until he's not.

I'm breathing heavily after a series of failed strikes. My knees are shaking. My father has that grin on his face that my mother insists I've inherited. A little cocky, uneven and wild. He beckons.

I burst forward, feign left, strike straight and slice along my father's cheekbone.

The cut bursts red.

His eyes go wide.

I drop my sword.

My heart hammers as I witness the impossible.

My father wipes away the line of blood with a thumb. It smears.

 _Nice move,_ is what he says.

That he ends the lesson immediately says something else entirely.

We go back inside and my father says something to my mother without words or hand signs. I guess the blood on his cheek is enough. She, in turn, asks Uncle Worick to take us for a walk. Again, without words but these silent looks that the three of them share.

I almost blurt, _Just say it!_

I have to be pushed out the door, fists at my sides and chin tucked to my chest. Before the door closes behind us, I watch as my mother cradles my father's face in her hands. I hate the look in her eyes, the flicker of bourgeoning grief.

Outside, I kick a stone down the road. Couldn't it just be that I've gotten better? After all these years of training, is the first hit I land really a warning of an end? I try to cling to that reasoning while I push away Uncle Worick's offering of ice cream.

He buys a third and forces it on me while he forces a grin.

"I gotta keep up my figure, kid. You're not seriously going to make me eat two, are you?"

I take it. He clamps a heavy hand on my shoulder and sighs. We all slump onto a bench and eat the ice cream in silence.

Only after biting into her cone does my sister ask, "What's wrong with Daddy?"

For the first time in my sister's life, Uncle Worick ignores her. Deep in his own head, he lets his ice cream melt over his hands and drip onto the concrete.

We sit until the sun sets in a bloody blaze.

* * *

**Part II: After**

Twilights still can't be buried within the city limits. Old rules take a long time to change and the segregation of cemeteries persists.

They are burned.

He died before I turned 16, a remarkably long life for someone as reckless and cursed as he.

A testament to Doctor Theo's work, for sure.

We were given his dog tags and a bag of ash.

There's a ceramic pot in the living room now, next to the record player.

* * *

My mother buried her tears in her shoulder. They were the kind cried by someone who had told themselves they wouldn't shed grief like this. They came in bursts, cheeks covered in tiny waterfalls, shoulders shaking like the world had been upended.

My sister clung to my mother and Uncle Worick, alternating between one lap or another even though she was really too old to be sitting in laps.

I got quiet. And in the quiet I found my anger. I stalked the streets in the rain. Hopped rooftop to rooftop, purposively took those dark alleyways wanting the danger they apparently held to swallow me up. Let me fall asleep and wake up beaten. Let me pass out in an oily puddle and destroy anyone who dares touch me.

Flanked on both sides by brick walls and garbage dumpsters, I recalled my earliest memories of being very young and my father ignoring me. He had kept his distance, a cold shadow in the corner of the room. I remembered not being able to name why it hurt so much.

Furious, I wondered about those lost years where he kept himself from me. It was as if they'd been stolen. How could he do that knowing the textbook facts pounded into us from the day we were born?

How could he leave us?

How could he leave _me_?

* * *

It was only much later that I realized he was afraid.

See, my mother eventually told me the little she knew of my father's childhood. His father and the sins that he surely passed onto my father. A different kind of generational burden, one that can't be managed with drugs, something that goes beyond bad blood.

Cruel violence.

I guess he was afraid that he would somehow pass that onto me.

After all, my father was never a soft man.

At the same time, he never laid a hand on me or my sister. He never cussed us out or demeaned us. I could never describe him as kind, knowing what he and Uncle Worick did for a living. I don't think I could say he was affectionate either.

But, in his quiet way, we knew where his heart resided.

* * *

_The roof top of the Mayor's office is dangerous. Tiled, steeply sloped. Just one wrong step and we'd crack the ceramic or slip and destroy more as we fell. But it offers the best view of the city._

_After spending all day yesterday in bed, my father takes me up here. I try not to see his struggle with the stairs. Perched, we watch birds take flight. I hear gunshots in the distance. Father's eye twitches and he raises a scarred finger, spying the thugs running down an alleyway even before I see them._

_"I will never leave this city," my father signs after the echoes of violence have faded._

_The back of my throat is tight. I pick at my shirt sleeves. I can't look at him, the bloody bandages, the wheeze in his lungs._

_"You will always have to fight. This city, as much as it has changed, was made to hate you. I..." he paused, grumbled, and then quickly signed, "pray" with a sigh. "I pray you make it out."_

_He then hugged me. I was embarrassed even though there was no one around. I was still 15 and being hugged by my father in the middle of the city._

_The cut on his cheek was still bleeding._

_But that's the way it was at the end._

_Wounds didn't heal._

_I glared at that blood, that evidence of what was to come, and wiggled out of his grasp._

* * *

Years later, my memory still stumbles every time I replay my father's use of the word _pray_. He was in no way a religious man, often mocking those who held those feelings. Like a scratched record, it's a blip in my mind. Something that betrays it significance by being out of place. It continuously trips me up.

It's only recently, I think now, I understand. To _hope_ wasn't strong enough; he felt escape was so rare, so impossible, that it would take the might of a deity to make it happen.

And that's what he wanted for me, for us. My mother and sister and me.

The impossible.

* * *

People say my father was cursed.

Thrice cursed for bringing us into the world and thrice again for leaving us. They're still saying that five years after he died.

It's funny then, that they always said Twilights are forgotten the moment their tags are yanked off their corpses.

_Nicolas Brown_

_Birth date: Unknown._

_West Gate._

_Mercenaries._

Sometimes, I catch my mother listening to the recording he left on his tag.

I know where she hides it.

Sometimes I listen to it too.

* * *

**Part III: Onward**

If he left us cursed, we'd never know.

Maybe his prayer was answered after all.

It takes a few years, but we do leave the city.

Not permanently, but the rules soften, science improves, and we can apply for travel visas.

Even with her connections to the underground, my mother waited months to get the tickets. We stocked up on medicine. A week was a long time to go without those pills.

We got on a bus, my mother, my sister, and I. Uncle Worick came too. I'd never heard him laugh as he did when my mother presented the idea to him.

 _"Ally, are you serious?"_ He had yelled as he swung her around in a hug.

I press my head to the bus's window, eyes wide at the landscape beyond the stucco maze of the city, beyond the gate cities. It is so green, a color I had only seen on television or album covers. Even though we're not going to the paradises of Paris, New York, or Kyoto, the whole trip is an indulgence.

It takes us three hours to get to the beach.

My sister nearly stumbles out of the bus in her haste, dragging my mother and her luggage with her. I let Uncle Worick out before me, my chest unexpectedly tight. Once I finally trot down the steps, the air outside burns my throat and it takes me some time to recall why. Salt. Something else from a textbook.

I breathe deeply.

I'm twenty years old.

My sister is fifteen.

Looking out at my sister already waist deep in the tide, I think, maybe, my father did make it out of the city. In a way. If generational curses and burdens define parents and their children, then so should accomplishments.

I run to the shore.

There's sand under my feet for the first time in my life. Waves lap and froth around my ankles. I gasp, spying fish swimming in the water; alive, tiny things not in a can or on a plate. I dash, relishing the tug of the currents on my body, the wind whipping through my hair, the white caps crashing far out into the ocean.

From there, it's just the horizon; the watery expanse, the haze at the end of the earth.

It stops me in my tracks, sucks the breath from my lungs. I smile that crooked, wild grin I inherited.

The world is so big and so beautiful.

And out here, unlike in the city which has told me a lie for my entire life, I don't feel cursed.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been invested in Gangsta for a few years now, but this is my first go at fanfiction in this fandom. I know it's canonically pretty impossible for Nic to live this long, but I indulged myself. :)
> 
> Let me know what you think!


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